The 1975’s second album arrives freighted with expectations, and not just the usual expectations that get heaped upon the follow-up to a platinum-selling debut: advance publicity suggests that listeners should prepare for something strange, confounding and experimental. Some of this has been emanating from what’s left of the music press: “hugely ambitious and surreal”, “no easy listen”, “2016’s most unpredictable album”. And some of it has come from the 1975’s frontman, Matty Healy, a man who happily seems to have made it his life’s mission to never knowingly think before speaking when in the presence of a journalist: “I’m challenging people to sit through an hour and 15 minutes and 17 songs that all sound completely different from each other. It’s quite an emotional investment. It’s art … the world needs this album.”

The 1975: ‘No one's asking you to inspire a revolution. But inspire something’

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To this, one might reasonably respond that the 1975 were a fairly confounding prospect in the first place, a putatively alternative rock band – leather jackets; two guitars, bass and drums; emo-ish lyrics – whose music seemed, to the untrained ear, almost identical to the kind of chart pop that alternative rock bands are supposed to provide an alternative to: their eponymous debut was thick with synthesisers and the kind of 80s drivetime-rock influences that underpin Taylor Swift’s 1989 or Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, and for all the surly posturing in photographs, there’s a doe-eyed, boyband-ish quality about Healy’s vocals. Still, even the most cursory examination of I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It reveals that someone has contracted a raging case of the Serious Artists, a condition developed by pop stars who discover that selling hundreds of thousands of records and attracting crowds of screaming girls leaves them curiously unfulfilled.

All the common indications are here, from the self-consciously wordy title to the presence of a sombre instrumental that skulks around for four and a half minutes hoping someone’s going to compare it to Brian Eno or Berlin-era Bowie. Elsewhere we find singles heralded by typewritten manifestos and illustrations based on old Situationist cartoons; a desire to induce people to deploy the adjective “meta” – the album begins with another version of the brief eponymous track that opened their debut, as if it were a theme tune or advertising jingle, and there are a lot of lyrics that seem to address their fanbase’s fandom – and the presence of arcing, distorted guitars in the style of My Bloody Valentine or Mogwai.

Further complications arise from the fact that they appear to be suffering from Second Album Syndrome, too, presenting symptoms including the delusional belief that your cocaine habit is fascinating, a pathological urge to furnish a grateful world with the news that fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and a compulsion to apprise everyone of the hollowness and insincerity of celebrity parties. This is pretty well-worn territory, and occasionally it feels like it – introduced by an eerie female chorus and heavy on screamed vocals, The Ballad of Me and My Brain is a faintly excruciating depiction of rockstar ennui.

Incredibly, though, most of the time Healy gets away with it. That’s sometimes because his observations are sharp – as a skewering of celebrity #squad culture, “you look famous, let’s be friends / And portray we possess something important / And do the things we like” is pretty acute – but more usually because they come loaded with witty self-awareness and deprecation: the endless depictions of vacuous, coke-numbed girls he has met would get wearying were it not for the fact that he keeps turning the lyrical crosshair on himself. The lady in A Change of Heart sounds awful, but not as awful as him, quoting Jack Kerouac “like a twat”. Furthermore, he has an eye for a prosaic detail that undercuts the air of bustling self-importance. Rock stars have a tendency to depict their drug problems in hysterically grandiose terms – “what tongueless ghost of sin crept through my curtains?” as Noel Gallagher put it – but Healy is more mundane and realistic: “You look shit and you smell a bit.”

Besides, for all the talk about the hollowness of celebrity, I Like It When You Sleep … does not sound much like the work of people in any great hurry to leave fame behind. The stuff about Situationism feels a bit hackneyed and bolted on: the album ends with stark and affecting acoustic tracks about the death of Healy’s grandmother and his mother’s collapse into postnatal depression – the former called Nana, no less – that suggest the frontman may be substantially more interested in painful soul-bearing than in arch commentary. The musical experimentation, meanwhile, is neither here nor there: you could find better moody instrumentals and shoegazey guitar tracks elsewhere, and it perhaps says more about the times than the album in question when a rock band drafting in a gospel choir (on If I Believe You) gets treated as a baffling musical left-turn from which the blown minds of listeners may never fully recover. Instead, the real strength of the album isn’t much different to that of their debut. It’s stuffed with really good pop songs, their writers clearly unencumbered by fear of a certain melodic gaucheness: certainly there are few songs about numb-nosed ennui with quite as shamelessly toothsome a tune as Paris. Subtlety and fine detail are left for the arrangements, or at least some of them: there’s real intricacy in the mesh of guitars and synthesisers on UGH! or Love Me, and a knowingness about the way This Must Be My Dream breaks out the Careless Whisper sax three minutes in, but The Sound is straightforward pop-house. The real point of these songs is the huge, inescapable pop hook you find in all of them: they sound like hit singles.

You’re left with an album that fancies itself as a challenging work of art, but turns out to be a collection of fantastic pop songs full of interesting, smart lyrics, but also peppered with self-conscious lunges for a gravitas it doesn’t really need. Whether that makes it a success or a failure depends on whose metric you use, although there’s a sense that, for all his grandstanding, Healy may know where his strengths really lie: “I’m the Greek economy of cashing intellectual cheques,” he shrugs on Loving Someone, immediately after making a clanging reference to Guy Debord. He can afford his insouciance: its failings aren’t going to preclude I Like It When You Sleep … becoming a vast success.